Articles on Telecommunication

At a conference entitled Patents in Telecoms & the Internet of Things, at George Washington University in the District of Columbia last week, I was perturbed to hear a speaker mischaracterizing the communications standards as platforms of preexisting technologies upon which IoT innovation will occur. Major research and development investments are being made in communications technologies and standards to satisfy the anticipated demands of 5G and IoT. In fact, these investments, with significant innovations resulting already, are largely a leap of faith in advance of hoped-for IoT applications development and proof of demand for these.

Consumers are only beginning to use LTE in unlicensed spectrum. So far chatter has mostly been about operator trials, commercial chipsets and sales of devices to seed the market before anyone is to be able to use the new service feature. Nevertheless, the commercial impact will be quite dramatic within a few years.

Technology innovation by chip, device and equipment vendors plus intense competition among national oligopolies of mobile network operators has improved cellular performance and reduced costs to the enormous benefit of consumers. Meanwhile, recent financial gains in the mobile ecosystem are largely accruing to Silicon Valley's tech titans including Apple, Alphabet, Facebook and Netflix. The massive network investments required for 5G may not be forthcoming if this imbalance persists.

Regulators in many countries have asserted that setting asymmetric mobile termination rates (MTRs) between the incumbent mobile telephony operator and its smaller rivals is an efficacious means by which to help entrants attain efficient scale. We investigate empirically the efficacy of this policy experiment using data from a global sample of 34 countries from 1996 through 2014. We estimate a model that relates operators' long-run market shares to initial entry conditions and the degree of asymmetry among MTRs using an instrumental variables (IV) strategy. The estimates imply that a high degree of asymmetry among MTRs lowers an entrant's long-run market share by roughly 4 percentage points compared with a regime of symmetric MTRs, and the effect is roughly constant across market penetration levels. Furthermore, mobile operators tend to perform better when entering markets with higher levels of concentration and lower levels of market penetration. Our novel findings cast doubt on the efficacy of imposing asymmetric MTRs as a means to achieve greater equality of competitive outcomes. Our findings inform the larger body of theoretical literature on the pricing of interconnection and network access.

In 2005, Ofcom, then telecommunications regulator in the United Kingdom, implemented functional separation of British Telecom plc (BT), separating its wholesale and retail services. BT established a division within the company, Openreach, to provide equal access to its local access network and backhaul products. The tenth anniversary of this regulatory and corporate experiment is an appropriate moment to ask whether functionally separating Openreach from BT benefited consumers. We find that Openreach's creation generated short-run consumer benefits in the form of lower prices but also led to negative long-run effects, which outweighed the short-term price reduction.

As part of the Modification of Final Judgment (MFJ) that implemented the divestiture of the Bell operating companies (BOCs) from AT&T on January 1, 1984, the BOCs were forbidden to carry telephone calls from one local access and transport area LATA) to another. Although the Telecommunications Act of 1996 superseded the MFJ, it retained the BOCs' interLATA prohibition and established, in section 271, a process – involving each state public utilities commission, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), and the Department of Justice (DOJ), acting on a state-by-state basis – by which the BOCs could earn regulatory approval to enter the interLATA market within the regions in which they provide local exchange service. As of September 1, 2002, the BOCs had received section 271 authorizations to provide in-region interLATA service in fifteen states.

The versatile Markovian point process was introduced by M. F. Neuts in 1979. This is a rich class of point processes which contains many familiar arrival process as very special cases. Recently, the Batch Markovian Arrival Process, a class of point processes which was subsequently shown tobe equivalent to Neuts' point process, has been studied using a more transparent notation.

We study the performance of a statistical multiplexer whose inputs consist of a superposition of packetized voice sources and data. The performance analysis predicts voice packet delay distributions, which usually have a stringent requirement, as well as data packet delay distributions.

Recent studies have shown that the superposition of packet sequences generated by packetized voice sources with speech detection exhibit high burstiness due to inherent correlations between successive interarrival times in the superposition stream.